The House of Sacrifice

by Anna Smith Spark

  “Date?” Tobias asked Lenae. She shook her head, her mouth stuffed with peach. Juice running all sticky down her chin. Yeah. Nice to look at.

  The mage bloke got the green dragon again, hurt it. Big groan rang over the mountainside. Gods, thought Tobias, gods, don’t tell me something’s actually going to go one up on him?

  The green dragon and the red dragon met in the air. Quick conflab. Flew down over the city together. “Come on! Come on!” the spectators all shouting. Underdog forgotten. Cheer of “Yesssss!” as the mage sent up a blast of light that was abruptly snuffed out. Widespread applause. A curtain of fire came down over half the town.

  The dragons seemed to decide that was game over. The place was indeed looking pretty well scorched and bashed up. They flew off overhead into the mountains, to oohs and aahs as they came low over. Nasty smell from the green one’s injured wing.

  “I’ll have a date, now, thanks,” said Lenae. She got up. “That was amazing. When do you think we’ll go in?”

  Weird, really, looking at the city, thinking this time tomorrow it was going to be rubble and human mince. The whole army lining up there, waving their sarriss around, marching back and forward pointlessly so King Marith can feel good about himself, knowing this time tomorrow they could be dead and there’s absolutely nothing any of them can do to make it any different.

  Tobias sauntered off to use the nearest latrine trench. Most of the camp followers didn’t, filthy ignorant bastards, but. Pleasing, as always, that all the practical advice he’d given Marith about latrines had paid off. A lot of soldiers were squatting there with him, fresh from helping to chuck big rocks around and gasping with relief. All the fruit they’d been eating was, uh, having something of an effect.

  “Lovely display,” said Tobias. Seemed apposite to say something, when you’re shoulder to shoulder with a bloke hearing the sound of his shit come out.

  “You what?”

  Wait, no, not the—Oops, gods. Disgusting mind, you have, mate.

  “He means the siege, obviously,” bloke on the other side of him said. And: thank you. Someone with a clean train of thought. Face burning, Tobias shuffled himself to sort of facing him.

  “Clews, man!”

  Pause. “Uh, do I know you?”

  Porridge boy. Yeah?

  Oh, wait, no, he doesn’t know me. Can’t really say, “No, you don’t, but I wept over you, just recently, cause you reminded me of the life I fucked up.”

  “He’s a camp follower,” the man who’d thought he was talking about the men lined up shitting said. “They know all our names, the camp followers do. Idolize us.” Big, strong, solid-looking man, flashy hair, expensive cavalryman’s boots… some of the camp followers probably did know his name, yeah. He probably paid them extra if they screamed it.

  “Pathetic, they are, camp followers,” Clews said. Sneer in his voice. Trying to make his voice sound loud and strong. “Men camp followers! Cowardly. Should be soldiering.”

  Don’t rise to it, ignore it, you know what he’s doing, he’s a boy, it’s only bugging you because…“I was a soldier,” Tobias said. “I spent years soldiering, I’ll have you know.” Killed more men than you’ve had hot meals—for the love of all the gods, don’t say that, don’t. The cavalryman was grinning at them both, still crouching over the latrine trench. He’s got you right riled up, Tobias, this kid, and you know why, and just finish your crap and walk away.

  “Got scared, did you?” Clews said.

  Tobias stood up, knees creaking. “Got old and aching.” Started to walk off.

  “That’s no excuse. My squad commander’s probably older than you.”

  Stopped. Oh, gods, this boy. “Your squad commander got a knackered leg and a knackered arm and a broken rib that never properly healed?” Your squad commander fought a demon and a mage and a bloody fucking death god?

  Clews snorted. “Got men in my squad injured worse than that, still fighting on. A man in my squad with one arm. A man in my squad with half his face burned off. A—”

  “Yes, all right, okay, great, well done them.” Gods, if I had a sword right now, a knife, a bit of sharpened stick…

  “When Turain falls, tomorrow,” Clews said, “I’ll bring enough loot home to my family that they can get my sister married. If we get through the gates early, get the pick of the houses, I can bring home enough so my dad can stop having to work. And they paid a silver penny a head, they say, at Tereen. Couple of good strikes, that’d be enough we could buy the next field, hire a man to work it… And look at you, pleading your knackered leg.”

  The cavalryman with the hair was sniggering now. He and Tobias exchanged looks. Rolled their eyes at each other. Well, yes . . . There’s that, yes, true enough. Gods, poor dumb kid.

  “It’s fucking awful, the actual fighting,” Clews said. “But worth it.” Sneer came back, faking it so hard it hurt you to watch. “If you’re brave enough. A silver penny a head, they said.” He gestured vaguely towards the camp. “As we’re talking… you want to go for a drink?”

  Suppose the kid could just be desperate to fuck someone on possibly his last night of living. Let’s try to be charitable here. Part of him wanted to take the kid off and listen, even, lend him a handkerchief, tell him it would be all right in the end.

  Tobias said, “I’ve got things to do. Cowardly old-man camp-­follower things.”

  Decided to turn in early. Curled up in the tent. Went to sleep thinking of dragons dancing, peach juice dripping down Lenae’s chin.

  You miss it, Tobias, man, he thought as he drifted up off to sleep. Bronze and blood and fire and killing. You lie to yourself, but you always will. You, washing clothes? Yeah, right.

  Warm water smell, heavy feel of wet cloth, washing the fucking blood out.

  Symbolic, yeah, don’t you think?

  Chapter Twelve

  Landra Relast, Marith’s enemy, sworn to defeat him and destroy him

  Ethalden the Tower of Life and Death, the first Amrath’s capital, the City of the Ansikanderakesis Amrakane, the King of Ruin, the King of Death

  When Landra had last been here, Ethalden had been a city of workmen, of raw stone slabs and stacked timbers, building rubble, scaffolding, workers’ huts, soldiers’ tents. The air had smelled of sawdust and stonedust, great clouds of it stirred up; the air had resounded with the shouts and songs of labourers and craftsmen. Marith’s fortress had risen up in the midst of this chaos, a glory of gold and mage glass and marble, heavy silk and shining fur and bright gems. Throne rooms, banqueting halls, pleasure gardens, crystal fountains pouring out perfumed water coloured red or blue or deep lush forest green. A central tower like a beam of sunlight was set at its very centre, so high it seemed to come down from the heavens to the earth. It was made of silver and pearl, hung with red banners; on balconies at its heights bells and silver trumpets rang out. Beside it stood two temples, one of gold dedicated to Queen Thalia, one of iron dedicated to Marith himself. In its shadow stood a tomb of onyx, holding the bones of the first Amrath.

  Every master builder in Irlast had been summoned to Ethalden. Men who could work stone to create marvels, for whom stone could flow like water, who could pour out beauty onto the bare earth. Men with hands running with magic, with power over stone and metal to raise them up into dreams. Thirty days, Marith Altrersyr Ansikanderakesis Amrakane had given them to build him a fortress. If it was not completed as the sun rose on the thirty-first day, he would kill them. On the morning of the thirty-first day, the feast of Sunreturn, Landra had watched Marith ride into his fortress to be crowned King of Illyr and of all Irlast.

  And now around the fortress a city was forming. Palaces for Marith’s lords. Storehouses for the wealth of his empire. Barracks for his armies. Docks from which ships sailed across the world. He had emptied the towns and villages of Illyr, resettled the people here. The streets were wide and well-made, the houses tall.

  Landra had once been betrothed to Marith Altrersyr. Her father had been
Lord of Third Isle, one of the greatest lords of the White Isles, a companion of King Illyn Marith’s father. Her brother Carin had been Marith’s lover, until Marith killed him. It was in her father’s house of Malth Salene, the Tower of the Shining Sea, that Marith was first crowned king. Marith had killed his own father before Malth Salene’s walls. After he had killed Landra’s father and her mother and her sister, and thought that he had killed Landra herself.

  In the ruins of Ethalden, as the great battle for the ruins of Amrath’s city had still raged, Landra had uncovered the bones of the first Amrath, used a power they held clenched within them to try to destroy Marith. Failed. In the new city rising on the rubble of the battlefield she had seen Marith crowned in his new palace he had built himself on the site of her failure. Her brother would have wept for him, she had thought. She had tried herself to weep for him.

  Don’t go looking for vengeance: but, oh, it is too late for that. No other arguments left. Anything else is weak. She thought now: I did not want to come back here. I do not want to do this. But I must. I must. It hurt to her soul, guilt and anger mixed together. Shame, dry and crouched, flaked with dried blood. And the joy, on top of it. Perfume to her soul. Landra Relast, who had nothing left. Do it! Do it! You must! She had crossed half the world, to return here, to do this. She was not certain whom she thought of, when she thought of vengeance. Against Marith, or against herself. When she had found him he was dead, nothing, forgotten, a sellsword in a rough company of failed killers. He was content enough with his life, he had claimed. All he had ever wanted: to be nothing. She had brought him back to his kingdom to punish him. Ah, gods, Amrath and Eltheia, she had punished him. The great tragedy of all our lives, she thought: that I walked the wrong way down a street in a distant city, and thought I saw his face, and followed him. If I had been looking the other way, when he passed me… If I had walked left rather than right out of a shop… Through such absurdities the world is brought to this.

  A soldier spares a child in the sack of a city: the child grows up to be a man who beats his wife. A cruel master dies, his heir frees his servants: they starve and freeze on the road, homeless, lost. A woman chooses one dress over another: a dressmaker’s child eats or does not eat that night. Deep inside her, a voice laughed and stirred. Rustle of green leaves. Giggle of running water. Scream of grief. It is not vengeance, she thought. It is just and good. He is Ruin. The world will be a better place without him.

  What would I have done, Lan thought, if he had asked me to forgive what he did to me?

  She spat in the dust, mounted up on her horse, rode slowly down the hill towards the city that shone before her.

  Reached the city’s gates in the late afternoon. All of white marble, and the city walls themselves were solid gold. As though he had thought of the bronze walls of Sorlost and promised himself that he would outdo them. Measuring himself by this. And the green and gold walls of Malth Salene, she thought. Somewhere here was a boy clasping Carin’s hand with a smile.

  Guards at the gate in bronze armour and red badges, the Altrersyr colour, red banners above the gates snapping in the cold wind. Bored-looking, guarding a city at the end of the world: they must dream of being in his wars. She could feel the spear points whispering to them. A wagon came out through the gates with its cargo safely muffled against the weather. It was so cold that the oxen drawing it steamed out breath like dragons; Landra could smell the sweet hay scent of them, a good smell.

  “What is your business?” the guard on the gate asked her, when it was her turn to enter.

  “I am seeking work,” she lied in a flat voice. He looked at her, and she saw what he must see, her head swathed in cloth covering what should be her hair, her scars, the dry cold of her eyes, the stiffness in her body of knotted wounds. Still a young woman, somewhere beneath it all, but her face was the face of a thing carved from rock. “It’s not as bad as you think,” she used to hope for Tobias to tell her, when he caught her looking at her reflection, “people always look worse to themselves, yeah?” It can’t be as bad as you think.

  The guard shrugged. “Come in, then. Ethalden the City of the King welcomes you.” A rich man with a guard around him rode in after her and was not questioned. She still noticed that she noticed that. She found an inn, argued with the innkeep over the cost of stabling, argued with the innkeep again until he moved her to a room with a door she could lock. The whole inn smelled of sawdust. Joists still creaking and settling, plaster in places still damp. The stairs to her room were badly made, the steps uneven; the bedroom door struck in the frame. But she had never been in a place so new and clean. They could only have finished building it in the last week.

  She ached. Her whole body, aching. Deep pain, down to the bones, in her back, her stomach, in her chest when she drew a breath. In her hands, up her arms, pulling and twisting up her right arm, the fingers on her right hand puffed up red and numb. She spat on her fingers, rubbed the spit into them, took a water bottle from her belt and poured water over them to try to ease the pain.

  Chilblains, she told people. Winter is a cruel goddess, gnawing at the flesh. The skin looked heavy, mottled like old meat. She had seen people wince, rub their own hands, when they saw it. She opened and closed her fingers. Shook her hand out. The pain faded a little. It would not heal while Marith lived.

  She went over to the window, which faced north over the city out towards the Bitter Sea. The end of everything. An hour’s walk, and then sheer cliffs, and then the sea going on into eternity. No ship would sail on those waters. Wave upon wave upon wave of dark water, on until the world’s end. It was pleasant looking out in that direction, thinking of the sea beyond the walls. Far beyond human hopes or cares. Ignorant of all human things. No hope no pain. Calming. The desire to be herself beyond human things.

  The wind was getting up, shaking the branches of a tree opposite the window A birch tree, its bark white as bone. Its branches rattled like bone. “His city is built on bones and blood and tears, His city is built on the flesh of living men,” the songs of praise to King Marith said. “Is it true?” one of soldiers had once asked her, a new recruit, young and ardent and eager, all his love for Marith glittering out of him, “is it true, that he ordered his fortress to be built on living bodies, that he mixed the mortar with human blood?” The Army of Amrath had just taken Raen, had built their towers of skulls where the walls had stood. And the soldier’s eyes had gleamed, looking past the skulls, seeing greater, more terrible things. “Is it true? Really? They say you were there, Lan, they say you’ve been with the army since Illyr. Tell me it’s true, won’t you?”

  She had tried to speak, but no words had come from her mouth.

  “It is,” Tobias had said. “I saw it. I saw.” And then he’d rolled his eyes. “And other places aren’t, of course. Alborn, Morr Town, Sorlost the Golden, Malth Salene… no one suffered and strained and got hurt building them. Light as air, the stones that built Malth Salene, and the labourers were paid in gold.”

  “That’s not the same, Tobias,” Lan had said.

  “No. It’s not. Obviously it’s not. But . . .” Tobias had shaken his head. “Never mind, then. I’m being cruel.”

  Raen had been chaos, the usual maelstrom after a sack. Landra had taken her knife in her injured right hand, buried the blade up to the hilt in the soldier’s heart.

  Filth. Her heart had sung out for joy. One less of them. A tiny bright difference: somewhere in the heart of a loving world a joyous song is rising. Her shame had been a void beneath her feet.

  “You know what I mean,” Tobias had said. “Don’t you?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Better get your knife clean, Lady Landra,” Tobias had said. “And get away from that corpse.”

  She had left Tobias the next morning, fled away north towards the cities of Ander and Balkash. Warn them. Beg them. I can no longer bear it, she had told herself, I must act, make it stop. Something can be done and must be done. She had once loosed a gabe
leth, a vengeance-demon; she had once fought beside a gestmet, a god of life. Thus she could do things. A bright light in the world, was Lady Landra Relast. A joyous song, a good sweet song to make the world a better place. Thus every night she cursed him. I will not rest, she swore to herself, until he is defeated and all who follow him are dead.

  Knife in her heart. Shame and pity. Her hands ached sore heavy wound red. The wind blew in the branches of the tree opposite, and the branches scratched together like bones, and the bark was white like bones in the fading light.

  But in the dawn, ah, Ethalden was beautiful. Grey mist around the towers, fading, they were unreal, they were not buildings but statues, stone dancers, robed in clouds, they were giants dancing, they wore the dawn as jewels on their skin. Landra slept well and peacefully. Her ancestor Amrath’s city: so perhaps He blessed her, eased her pain, let her sleep. Perhaps her hair and her skin were healed a little. Her wounds less harsh. There were a thousand birds in the city of Ethalden, and every one of them seemed to gather beneath her window that morning to sing. She rested her hands on the windowsill and gazed out at the city, over towards the gold walls and away into the horizon where the sea would be. Peace. Peace. The streets already busy with people, animals, voices chattering, the sound of building work. Women in fine dresses, workmen already covered with stone dust clinging damp to their clothes, slave labourers from half the world chained in filth. Trades being made, goods bought and sold, gold and treasure and living men. The patterns and circles of every city: those who dance begin to dance, and those who weep begin. Beggars, naturally, as in every city—but fewer than in other cities, she thought, where the wealth of the world did not now come. Even as she watched, a woman gave a beggar a coin, smiled at him. Children playing—she watched a pair of them, a boy and a girl, from their matching curls they must be brother and sister. The girl ran and the boy chased her, the boy caught her and pulled at the girl’s dress; they began to quarrel, the girl pulling her brother’s hair; a woman ran up to scold them, kiss the boy’s curls, take their hands firmly and walk on. Pilgrims were making for the tomb of Amrath. Strong young men and women were looking to join the Army of Amrath. Some kind of absurdity here that she, Landra, was a descendant of Amrath.